1984 Fender Super Champ

This is one of the under-valued and rarely seen 80’s Fender amps made during the era where Paul Rivera was head of marketing and involved along with Lee Jackson in the circuit design. They are hand-wired amps that have the typical glassy Fender cleans with reverb, but they also sport all tube distortion channels that sound similar to Mesa Boogie with their cascading gain stage design. These sound really cool. The amp puts out about 18 watts! More like a Princeton than a Champ.

The amp was completely restored. All caps were replaced with upgraded voltage and temperature rated MOD brand electrolytic’s. The cap can was replaced with a new vintage spec CE brand multi-section 80/40/30/20uf 525v type unit. The power dropping resistors were upgraded to 2 watt metal oxide type. Two coupling capacitors leading into the reverb recovery/phase inverter driver were modded to provide better bass response for clean and distorted channels.

The tubes were all replaced (except the 6C10): V1 = GENALEX GOLD LION 12AX7, V2 = EHX 12AT7, V3 = FENDER/GE 6C10, V4 -V5 = JJ 6V6GT Matched Pair. The original - and unusual - 6C10 Compactron tube was still in good shape which is lucky since they are extremely rare now and cost upwards of $200 each. They are 12 pin preamp tubes with 3 separate triode sections in the same glass envelope that have the spec’s of a 12AX7. Compactrons were commonly used in 1960’s TV’s to save space compared to octal or noval tubes - they even economically competed against early transistor technology. The non-adjustable fixed bias was adjusted by the resistor network to bring the Plate Dissipation to a correct %56 with a B+ of 405 VDC. A new 3 prong AC cord was installed as the old one was fraying. New preamp tube shield retainers were installed since the originals were broken. All pots were cleaned and hardware tightened.